I’m quite often teased by many of my readers for being follicly challenged – so I’ve been really looking forward to this moment when my balding blogging brothers can unite in a blog home of our own a Baldiness – a b5 blog about baldness written by Cory Aldrich.

Actually – as I think about it – I suspect that it could be a popular blog with quite a few prominentbloggers. I actually suggested a club for bald bloggers to Steve a month or so ago and he said there’d be plenty of members – maybe we need a spin off forum for this blog or something :-)

The team at AdSense are looking for stories from publishers about how AdSense has impacted them. If you feel like telling your story head to their AdSense story telling page and have your say. If you allow it your story might even be featured as a future AdSense case study.

Regan over at the Commonwealth Games Review blog (while I have some blogs at that domain I’m not involved in this one) has developed a Free Medal Table for the Games for bloggers to put on their websites. The top 10 medal winning countries will be updated automatically (expect to see Australia at the top soon!)

This is a smart move on his part and is something he’s done before with real success. It’s a useful tool that some bloggers will be really interested in using (not everyone as not everyone is in the Commonwealth or into sport – but quite a few) and it benefits Regan with all the incoming links back to his blog. It’s a good example of a meme tool that can be quite viral.

I love reading the stories of (and meeting) young technological entrepreneurs. There’s something about the freshness of their ideas and ‘can do’ attitude that is so amazing. I think Matt’s one to watch.

Having looked at some of the advantages of joining a blog network it’s only fair that we look at the flip side. Blog networks will not suit every blogger’s personality, style and goals and you should take into account the following before signing up for one:

1. Revenue Split - While I argued in my previously post that a positive of joining a network is that it can potentially bring in a higher revenue to your blog – the downside is that with most blog networks you will be sharing this revenue with the owners of it in some way. In the larger more established networks you are likely to be paid a flat rate per month for posting a certain amount of posts and might be paid incentives based upon factors like traffic and revenue. In smaller and newer networks the revenue is generally shared between network and blogger in some way (usually some sort of percentage split). The methods of payment are varied but at the heart of all of them is that you don’t get every cent your blog owns. If you’re not willing to share a blog network might not be for you.

2. Ownership/Rights – Once again there are variations between networks when it comes to who retains ownership of content – but this is a key question that you’ll want to explore with the network before signing up. In many networks the content that you produce as a blogger is fully owned by the blog network and in a sense you are just contracted to write for them. This means that if you leave the network you leave with nothing but the earnings you earned during your stay. Other networks allow you to retain ownership but ask for some sort of exclusive rights to user your content in different forums. Other networks use a joint ownership system where both you and the network owns the content. There is no wrong or right way for content ownership to be viewed in my opinion – but it’s definitely something to think through before you join a network. Questions to ask a network might include:

Back at the end of December, I wrote an article for ProBlogger entitled 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0. Three(ish) months and 2 security/bugfix releases laters, I think WordPress 2.x deserves another look – a follow up, if you will.

Importers
In December, I raved about the rewriting and re-implementation of a number of import paths from other blog systems Personally, I have worked with four of the six standard importers now available for Moveable Type, Live Journal, Blogger, Textpattern, Dotclear and RSS. I personally wrote the Textpattern script and I hope to have a Nucleus importer available for the next major release of WordPress. Contact me if you need it.

Anyway you look at, it’s great to see more availability for bringing content in from other systems. It still seems kind of boneheaded that there are no import paths from other WordPress or WordPress.com blogs but I imagine it’s only a matter of time.

Image Uploading
Image handling was one of my biggest pet peeves about WordPress 2.0. It was horrible when it was released but Andy Skelton did due diligence brilliantly on getting this feature to not only work appropriately but work phenomenally. Back in December, image uploading did not handle thumbnails/original size images well at all. If one used the Rich Text Editor included in WordPress, even when attempting to use the Original Size feature, it would insert as a thumbnail and scaling would create pixelated images.

Also ‘The 360′ just published a short Instant Message interview with me on some aspects of the future of web publishing, AdSense and other miscellaneous things. It’s my first IM interview – a little different from doing them via email where you have a lot of time to think and craft your answers – but fun.

Manolo just emailed me to let me know that he’s looking for a blogger to help out with some blogging on Men’s fashion which will release him to start working his new blog on Food and Drink (he’s got quite the little empire developing over there).

So if you’re into Men’s fashion you might want to head over and apply for the position.